On 21 and 22 January GMV took part in the seminar «Bark-beetle damage in the SCERIN domain: detection, monitoring and associated Land Cover Change dynamics» organized by the South-Central European Regional International Network (SCERIN) for the Global Observations of Forest Cover and Land Use Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD). 

This seminar focused on the impact of bark-beetle outbreaks in the forests of Central-Eastern Europe. This beetle attacks the trees’ bark, debilitating them to the point of death. When its population reaches plague level it could devastate vast swathes of woodland, producing huge environmental and economic losses.

Ángel Fernández, Earth Observation Data Scientist of GMV’s Remote Sensing & Geospatial Analytics division, talked about the use of Sentinel-2 satellite data for detecting bark-beetle damage in Europe’s forests highlighting the development and results of GMV’s biotic damage product. This technological solution, developed under the GMV-led European project MySustainableForest, looks for, detects, delimits and estimates woodland plague damage using machine-learning techniques.

A study on the impact of these plagues was also presented in a paper called "Monitoring Bark Beetle Forest Damage in Central Europe. A Remote Sensing Approach Validated with Field Data", published in October in the journal Remote Sensing and drawn up by GMV with the collaboration of Mendel University in Brno (Czech Republic), another member of the MySustainableForest consortium.